The story is well known how Maxwell Perkins, senior editor at Scribner's, helped Thomas Wolfe put together his second novel, Of Time and the River, and how Wolfe, ever ready to add more material to this excessively long book, was reluctant to let his manuscript go to the printers. As time goes on and more evidence turns up, it becomes possible to see in more detail the situation that prevailed in the bringing forth of this remarkable book. Both Wolfe and Perkins have recorded statements that blurred or distorted the picture. Wolfe asserted dramatically in The Story of a Novel that Perkins had suddenly sent his book to the printers while Wolfe was away on a two-week vacation in October 1934. When he returned, galley proof was beginning to come in. Perkins has provided information about Wolfe's unwillingness to see his book go into print. He wrote that Wolfe sat in the Scribner library day after day brooding over the galley proofs but not doing anything with them and that the proofs were read by another Scribner editor, John Hall Wheelock, and then sent to the printer.

With the publication of The Letters of Thomas Wolfe [edited by Elizabeth Nowell] and Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins and, above all, Elizabeth Nowell's biography of Wolfe, a less dramatic story began to emerge. In July 1934, Wolfe wrote to Robert Raynolds, "It seems unbelievable, but Perkins and I finished getting the manuscript ready for the printer last night," and he went on to add that there were still some scenes to be written. A few days later he wrote to his brother Fred, "Believe it or not, Perkins sent the manuscript of my book to the press three days ago. There is a great deal I want to do and must do yet, but it must be done within the next two and a half months—because after that, it will be too late. We will start getting proofs back in two or three weeks, and from then on I have got to keep feeding it to the printers. I have been at work on it so long that it was hard to give it up. He almost had to take it away from me; but he is the best judge.… There are many, many more things that I would like to do. It has cost me many a wrench to see the tremendous chunks and pieces we have had to cut out of it. There is much more that I would like to put in."

Additional evidence has recently emerged that brings us even closer to the situation. In 1983, the first forty sheets of galley proof for Of Time and the River appeared in the literary market and were purchased by the University of North Carolina Library. They correspond to Books I and II of the novel, the first 133 pages—that is, they include Eugene's long train ride to the North, his early experiences at Harvard, and his coming to know Uncle Bascom in Boston. These galley proofs are part of the set John Hall Wheelock corrected. At the top of galley 1, he has written "Tom: you have galley 82," which indicates that by that time at least one-fourth of the book had come back from the printer. Wolfe's own set of these forty galleys, now in the Houghton Library at Harvard, are completely unmarked. The University of North Carolina galleys, however, show the hands of both Wheelock and Wolfe, and in examining them, we can see the two of them at work together.

What kind of marks and changes had Wheelock made? What we find are only corrections of errors and some minor copy editing. The substantive changes are of this sort: "if" in place of "whether"; "complacent," rather than "complaisant"; "smoking wheat cakes," rather than "country wheat cakes." Wheelock makes an adverb more appropriate when "'yes, thank God,' someone murmured softly but devoutly" becomes "softly but fervently." Mr. Flood's movement of his arm with a painful grunt was referred to in the galley as a "delicate movement"; Wheelock made it a "delicate operation." Luke Gant is assessed by one of the men in the parlor car as one who could "sell Palm Beach suits at the North Pole"; Wheelock changed it to "sell Palm Beach suits to the Esquimaux." Wheelock also supplied an explanation at the point Wolfe introduced Starwick as being in "Professor Hatcher's class"; he expanded it to "Professor Hatcher's celebrated course for dramatists, of which he was himself a member." But Wheelock's chief contribution was to insert space between portions of the text when a jump in time took place or when the narrator began one of his meditations on time or the American landscape or when Eugene's mind flashed back to the past.

Wheelock's contribution then had been merely functional and we can dispense with the myth that he had to go through the galleys changing all the "I"s to "he"s. As a matter of fact, a look at the final typescript, now in the Houghton Library, shows that all the material for these 40 galleys had been written in the third person with the exception of one portion of Book II about Eugene's reading in the Harvard Library, which had to be changed in typescript from first-person narration. One other exception is part of the material about Uncle Bascom that had been pasted on pages clipped from the Scribner's Magazine story, "A Portrait of Bascom Hawke." All those paste-ups from the magazine pages had been in the first-person but the evidence of other typewritten pages shows that even the Uncle Bascom material had been written originally in the third person.

What the forty galley sheets show without question is that the predominant number of changes and additions were made by Wolfe. In the first place he had been very careless about the typescript that was sent to the printer. He had not made all the necessary changes from an early version of the drunken conversation on the train, and corrections were needed in the galleys: the name "John" instead of "Eugene" appears three times. This is something Wheelock could not have recognized, because the drunken dialogue among the three young fellows does not indicate clearly who is speaking to whom. Again, Eugene's brother Steve is called "Gil" in galleys seven times, and only Wolfe knew to correct it. Also typographical errors in the typescript were not always evident to Wheelock, so some still remained in the galleys when he passed them on to Wolfe. Only the author would know, for example, that a reference to "that Cleveland guy" should have been "that Cleveland gang," or that "the thinning noises" should have been "thrumming noises."

Wolfe also made many changes in the names of characters—the names of Altamont men in the smoking car and of Altamont boys mentioned when Eugene was arguing with Robert Weaver. It appears that some real-life names of Asheville citizens had remained in the story right up to the galley-proof stage.

As Wolfe went through the galleys, he occasionally made small stylistic improvements in both narration and dialogue: "long stride" becomes "lunging stride"; Warren G. Harding's service "to the public" becomes service "to his country"; Eugene's father's "huge form" becomes "long form"; Robert Weaver's "look of restlessness" becomes an "expression of restlessness." There are a large number of these revisions on the galley sheets.

The change in point-of-view that Wolfe had made from some early versions of this material also affected one of the meditations on the American earth, a passage that occurs when Eugene wakes on the train and looks out the window. One can see why Wheelock made no change in it because it refers to "men's hearts" responding to the appearance of the earth at dawn's first light. In the galleys, it appears in the first-person plural:

The earth emerged with all its ancient and eternal quality: stately and solemn and lonely-looking in that first light, it filled men's hearts with all its ancient wonder. It seemed to have been there forever, and though we had never seen it before, to be more familiar to us than our mother's face. And at the same time, it seemed we had discovered it once more, and if we had been the first men who ever saw the earth the solemn joy of this discovery could not have seemed more strange or more familiar. Seeing it, we felt nothing but silence and wonder in our hearts, and were naked and alone and stripped down to our bare selves, as near to truth as men can ever come.

On the passage goes. Wolfe altered it all to third-person plural: "Seeing it, they felt nothing but silence and wonder in their hearts," and so on.

But the principal kind of alteration that Wolfe made was to add material. In the very second paragraph he inserted a long clause. The people waiting on the railroad platform are said to have been drawn there by a common experience, an event of the first importance to all Americans, the arrival of a train—then comes the clause that Wolfe added: "because in it has been compacted the legend of dark time—our thousand weathers and our billion lives, all of our vast and unrecorded history, the awful stillness of the wilderness, all of the hope, the hunger and the waiting that lay buried in our father's heart and of the whole huge memory of the old swarm-haunted mind of man."

You will note that Wolfe does not hesitate to use the first-person plural here when he as narrator is referring to Americans in general. Nor need he have worried about the long passage that I was describing a moment ago. Wolfe as narrator does not trouble a normal reader when he speaks with a communal voice.

But here is a surprise: this lengthy clause does not appear in the printed copy of Of Time and the River. Nor do two other insertions of substantial length. One is a two-page digressive description of an odd-looking interne at the hospital. Another is a fascinating elaboration about Eugene's paranoiac response to life. In the dialogue with Robert Weaver, Eugene learned that a certain local matron had been praying for him as if he were well on the way to perdition. He became furious about town gossip and he feels attacked by "them." Wolfe wanted to add the following sentence. "And like a man faced fiercely and alone against the blind brute mass and hatred of a senseless world, he now told himself bitterly that he did not care what 'they' might say about him, without knowing who 'they' were, without understanding whence 'they' came, or why 'they' were arrayed against him—hating, fearing only 'they,' immortal and phantasmal 'they,' the scourge of youth, and life's great bane of deathling men, that goads us on forever with its scorpion-whip of scorn and fury, and that will not let us rest."

But other small additions do get inserted, as well as one major passage that comes at the conclusion of the drunken revelry as Eugene goes to bed in the Pullman car: the imagined riders Pale Pity and Lean Death on their horses, whose hooves pound to the rhythm of a line from Virgil, "Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum."

Some time in August, Wolfe returned the first eleven galleys to Wheelock with a note. He said, "I found little to do here although I am not wholly satisfied with the way it flows—I put some question marks in margins of galleys 10 and 11 for this reason: the tense changes from past to present—present when describing the look of the little town from the train window. Do you find this change of tense jumpy and confusing—and if you do will you change it to past tense?" (Letters). The question he asks is characteristic of the way he sought advice of editors, and of his literary agent, all though his career.

In mid-September, Wheelock wrote Wolfe: "When are you going to let me have back the first thirty-eight galleys which you and I went over together and which are, as I recall it, ready for the printer?"

At this point, we can ask what does all this tell us about Wolfe's situation with respect to his editors? The indications are that at first he was working hard but slowly over the galleys, yet was so full of misgivings and uncertainties that he was delaying to return the galleys and have them go into pages. But it further appears that when he and Wheelock went over the first thirty-eight galleys together, Wheelock (and perhaps Perkins) found most of Wolfe's changes and additions valuable but rejected four of the additions as unworthy of his text. Thus, Wolfe found that some of the sentences he had wished to add, whatever their appropriateness or lack thereof, he was unable to get into his book. Earlier he had submitted to Perkins's judgment about his manuscript; now he was losing control of his galley proofs to someone, either Wheelock or Perkins. His reaction, it seems, was to retreat from the scene entirely. He took a trip to the Chicago Fair and made a leisurely return home, stopping off in Ohio and in Pittsburgh. When he returned in October after a two-weeks' absence, he found that Perkins and Wheelock had waited for him no longer. They had sent a huge batch of galleys back to the press to be put into page proof. This is the situation Wolfe was referring to in The Story of a Novel when he said he returned from Chicago to discover that Perkins had sent his book to the printer.

The remainder of the Wheelock-Wolfe galleys, now in the Houghton Library, tell the rest of the story. Wolfe had ceased cooperating with Wheelock, after galley 40, or perhaps 52. On galleys 52 through 213, Wheelock's routine corrections appear, including his improvement of Wolfe's French grammar. Occasionally, he had scribbled "Revise" at the tops of the galley sheets, but Wolfe had done nothing with them during the weeks he had them in hand. Suddenly on galley 214, Wolfe's marks appear again as he changes "Eugene" to "he" or "Eugene's" to "his" thirteen times in the next few galleys. The novel by this time had reached Eugene's sojourn in Paris. There are no more Wolfe corrections until one change for page 823, Eugene's conversation with the Countess.

The galleys have reached almost to the end of the book now and Wolfe has done almost nothing since galley 40 or 52. It would appear that he was so discouraged by the fact that not all of his insertions in the first forty galleys were accepted that he sank into inaction. Perhaps his misgivings so unsettled his resolve that he could not keep up to the schedule for the printer. Or perhaps he was even frozen into indecision by the fact that he could not make revisions without adding substantially to his text. In any case, this was not the way he was used to working. He was used to a lot of give-and-take with an editor and was frequently doubtful enough about his own purposes that he would ask an editor's opinion. When he had published stories in magazines, he was accustomed to making changes and additions right up to the last stage of publication. For example, he left a note with the revised typescript of his story, "Dark in the Forest, Strange as Time," saying to Alfred Dashiell, the editor of Scribner's Magazine, "Here's the story, with such corrections as I could now make. I think I've succeeded in changing it to past tense everywhere—and will you please look at the insertion which I have written in on page 9 to see if it is clear—and if I have succeeded in doing what you suggested there.… As to the title, will you consider this one tentatively—"Dark in the Forest, Strange as Time" (or "Dark in the Forest, Dark as Time" as a variant). Don't ask me what the title ineans, I don't know, but think it may capture the feeling of the story, which is what I want to do. This is all for the present—and please let me go over it again when you get proofs. P.S. I did not make the cuts on page 5 and 6 as you suggested.… If you think there's too much of this dialogue, go ahead and cut it out, but I wish you'd look it over again to make sure" (Letters).

In the progress on Of Time and the River there was suddenly now a major addition to the book that does not appear in the galley proofs. This apparently came about in December 1934 when Perkins finally was convinced by Wolfe's argument that a greater sense of conclusion was needed for the book. In this way, Wolfe created Book VII, "Kronos and Rhea." He took some material from the end of Book VI and the beginning of the next book, "Faustus and Helen" and wove into it two thematic fugues about time. Then he added another scene to the end of Book VIII (now entitled "Faust and Helen"), in which Eugene and Esther see each other from a distance on board ship and Eugene feels "impaled upon the knife of love." This concludes the novel and provides a link with the volume that was to follow.

What else do the galleys tell us about Wolfe as a writer and about his working relationship with his editors at Scribner's?

First of all, it is clear that Wolfe's creative talent was for proliferation and that he lacked that kind of secondary creativity which involves cutting, revising, or restructuring. His idea of clarifying a passage was to add a clause, a sentence, a paragraph, or a page. If Wheelock wrote "Revise" at the top of a galley, Wolfe did nothing, or he changed a character's name to a pronoun. What he really wanted to do was to write several pages, such as he was able to supply in creating "Kronos and Rhea."

The weeks of delay in getting the galleys back to Wheelock certainly reflect Wolfe's reluctance to let the book go, but this worry, he tells us in The Story of a Novel, attended all his approaches to publication: "… it is literally true that with everything I have ever written or had printed, not only my two books but also all the long and short stories that Scribner's Magazine and other magazines have published, I have felt at the last moment when the hour of naked print drew nigh a kind of desperation and have even entreated my publisher not only to defer the publication of my book until another season, but have asked the editors of magazines to put off the publication of a story for another month or two until I had a chance to look at it again, work on it some more, do something to it, I was not sure what."

The publication of Of Time and the River was further complicated, however, by the help that Perkins and Wheelock had contributed. To his own doubts Wolfe now added his uncertainty as to whether the judgment of his editors was right. Yet the situation he found himself in was of his own making. Although his statement in The Story of a Novel seems to convey a charge that his editors had taken his book away from him, this is really his paranoiac personality speaking. The case was quite the reverse.

In December 1933, Wolfe felt hopeless about the state of his book. He had been working for four years and his novel was still only an accumulation of fragments. When Perkins offered to look over what he had on hand, Wolfe welcomed the editorial rescue. He gave Perkins a mountain of manuscript made up of several disjunctive narrative strands and lyrical celebrations of the American experience, saying, "…in spite of all the rhythms, chants—what you call my dithyrambs—which are all through the manuscript, I think you will find when I get through that there is plenty of narrative—or should I say when you get through, because I must shamefacedly confess that I need your help now more than I ever did" (Letters). He had been trying to write a work that was not just another autobiographical novel, but he was unable to create any kind of lengthy narrative that was not based closely on his own life. When Perkins found that Wolfe's manuscript was a series of autobiographical episodes in an intermittent chronological order, he urged him to revive the persona of Eugene Gant again and pick up his story where Look Homeward, Angel had ended. This simple suggestion solved Wolfe's narrative problem. Thereafter he and Perkins worked together recasting the episodes and Wolfe wrote necessary material to fill in the gaps.

By submitting himself to Perkins's supervision in this way, Wolfe soon found himself caught in the exigencies of the publishing world. First, the publication of a book is announced, catalogues are prepared, advertising is planned, salesmen are advised. Second, manuscripts must go to printers if a schedule is to be met; once manuscripts are in galley proof, they cannot be delayed without increased costs; the same is true for page proofs. The publication of Of Time and the River, planned for publication in fall 1934, had already been postponed once and held over until spring 1935. The pressure on Wolfe was overwhelming.

Temperamentally he was not made for a world like this. Thus arose his resentment over being forced by circumstances to see his book go into the finality of print. Yet it seems irrefutably clear that if it had not been for Perkins and Wheelock, the book would never have been published at all, and American literature would have been deprived of one of its unique monuments.

Some critics, unfamiliar with Wolfe's working methods and not fully aware of the peculiarities of his creativity, have accused Perkins of harming Wolfe's work. I hope this examination of the evidence will have shown that, on the contrary, Perkins's advice, prodding, and insistence (plus Wheelock's patient contribution of his time) helped get into print the book that established Wolfe's reputation as the American writer who best carried on the tradition of Whitman and Melville in the twentieth century.…